The only other notable moment from the episode was the guest-appearance from Nate Diaz, who dropped in to lead a Team Rousey grappling session. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can watch it here.

(I *begged* them to have “Oh Yeah” playing in the background of this scene, but did they listen to me? Nooooooo.)

Yesterday, we mentioned that the Ultimate Fighter 18mid-season recap episode which aired on October 23rd was the least-viewed episode in the history of the series. To be specific, it received an average of only 476,000 viewers, a 24% drop from the previous low-water mark of 624,000 average viewers, brought in by TUF 16 episode 5. It was a poor showing, without question, but you can’t expect much out of a clip-show, especially since it was competing against the first game of the World Series. Surely, the numbers would bounce back the following week, when there was an all-new episode with a women’s fight on the schedule.

Actually, the numbers sunk even further. On October 30th, TUF 18 episode 9 — which featured the forcible ejection of Cody Bollinger and a savage performance by Sarah Moras — received a viewer average of only 452,000, a 5% drop from the freakin’ clip show. Obviously, the numbers were hurt once again by having to compete with Game 6 of the World Series, but it’s safe to assume that the UFC will never put together a mid-season recap episode for TUF ever again, because that shit is apparently ratings suicide. (By the way, is there really that much crossover between MMA fans and baseball fans? I can’t think of two more dissimilar sports, but I guess a lot of people were watching the MLB post-season this year. I don’t know. I wasn’t one of them.)

The recent TUF ratings news is just the latest in a string of bad viewership numbers for the UFC…

The last two quarterfinal matches are on the docket: Team Rousey’s Anthony Gutierrez vs. Team Tate’s Cody Bollinger, and Team Rousey’s Peggy Morgan vs. Team Tate’s Sarah Moras. Miesha feels good about the matchups, but Cody’s weight is a concern. He still has a lot of pounds to drop, and he eyes the burgers with longing and resentment.

Anthony has been watching TUF since season 5, when he was 15 years old. As you can imagine, the young gangster Nate Diaz made quite an impression on him. Being on the show himself is “completely unreal” to Anthony. Ronda describes him as “annoying and squirrely,” but in a good way.

Gutierrez’s weight-cutting routine involves sleeping while wrapped in multiple layers of blankets. Ugh, that looks terrible. I’m one of those “sleeps over the covers unless it’s freezing in the room” kind of guys. My wife is totally the opposite. She’s under the blanket even when it’s the middle of summer and the AC’s not working. Opposites attract, I guess. I don’t know. It’s something we’re discussing with out marriage counselor. Anyway, Anthony plans on rehydrating up to 155 pounds when this is all over.

Breaking from our usual tradition of giving long-winded, play-by-play recaps of each week’s The Ultimate Fighter, I’m going to keep things relatively short and sweet for yesterday’s episode, “Zone In,” which featured a fight between Josh Hill (Team Tate) and Michael Wootten (Team Rousey). It might be because the seventh episode of season 18 contained very few highlights of note, it might be because I am just catching up on the episode as I write this. In any case, I’ve already provided more introspection than I will for the rest of this recap, so let’s get started.

Following her three round war with Jessamyn Duke last week, Raquel Pennington receives a congratulatory talking to from Dana White, who insists that she “Let dem hands go, grrrl” if she wants to win this whole thing. He might have phrased that differently.

It’s father’s day back at the house (and presumably, the rest of the world as well), so you know what that means: DADS HAVING A CRYFEST!! Cody Bollinger is hit the hardest by the sads but Ronda Rousey stops by to give all the father’s shaving kits to make them feel better. Oh, so Team Tate gives Edmund a discount coupon for an eyebrow treatment and it’s offensive, but Ronda can hand out shaving kits all willy-nilly and we’re supposed to commend her for it? SHE-NAN-I-GANS.

Not willing to sit idly by and lose the Great Facial Hair Fracas of 2013, Team Tate puts up some photos of Fallon Fox ”Edmund Rousey,” a unibrowed, half-man, half-woman thing so horrifying that the cameras dare not show it. POINT GRYFFINDOR TATE. Dana White stops by to remove the photos but neglects to check the sauna like a goddamn amateur. Upon seeing the photo DW missed, Ronda immediately pulls the racist card on Team Tate. That’s right, unibrow jokes now qualify as racist. Tell them how we feel about this latest development, Hubert.

The tweet above is what happened when a fan asked the fun-lovin’ featherweight a relatively harmless question about who he fancied more, Ronda Rousey or Miesha Tate. And man did he knock this one out of the park. Eric Holden is crying and masturbating in your honor, sir.

To be honest, the most offensive thing about this tweet is the way McGregor sticks all the extra S’s at the end of “toes,” like he’s some over-excited teenage girl who can’t wait to get the new iPhone you guyssssssss!!! I fucking hate that shit. The real question is, which TUF 18 coach would be on toe-duty?

At the start of last night’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter, we learn that this week’s paired up opponents — Team Rousey’s Jessamyn Duke and Team Tate’s Raquel Pennington — were supposed to fight once before. Jessamyn was to make her pro debut against Raquel but her coaches made her pull out because they didn’t like the match up for her.

Jessamyn says she’s glad it is finally happening and on this large stage, no less. Raquel is like, whatever, I’m happy to fight you now because I was ready to fight you a while ago.

Raquel gets make over from Julianna Pena, who is supposedly a “little princess.” Raquel talks about the difficulty of having come out as gay to her family and learning to value her own happiness above what others think of her, while we watch her try on high heels, perhaps for the first time, and get a runway walking lesson from Julianna near the pool.

Raquel takes off the heels and gets back into the gym to work on her Muay Thai kickboxing — specifically defending against the clinch of the taller Jessamyn. Coach Tate tells Raquel not to respect Jessamyn’s punching power because she thinks the beanpole ex-model has not yet learned to hit with power. By contrast, Tate says that Raquel is the strongest girl on her team, and she’s concerned that Raquel will get going to a fast start.

After a commercial break, the teams are taken to something called The Green Valley Ranch, which seems to be a high-end bordello. A bunch of scantily clad Hooters Girls await them and pour them drinks. A pool party ensues, featuring gratuitous slo-mo shots of Tate entering the water and bikini-clad backsides. Luckily, the TUF YouTube channel has released video of that too:

If you’ve been following The Ultimate Fighter this season, chances are that, like us, you’ve been more than impressed with the quality of the fights themselves. Four great fights with four decisive (not to mention brutal) finishes have easily outshined most if not all of the petty drama that oft permeates the TUF house, a trend that has only increased since the program’s move to the FX and FOX Sports 1 networks.

In fact, episode 3, featuring the fight between Chris Holdsworth and Chris Beal, similarly drew in just 639,000 viewers. Here’s the thing, episodes 2 and 4 – which featured the female fights of Baszler/Pena and Rakoczy/Modafferi — performed significantly better than those featuring their male counterparts. As Meltzer writes:

For the Ultimate Fighter, there has been an up-and-down pattern in the ratings. As in, the week of a women’s fight, the audience is up. The two women’s fights, airing on Sept. 12 and Sept. 26, did 870,000 and 778,000 viewers live. The men’s fights on Sept. 19 and Oct. 3 did 639,000 and 640,000.

Episode 5 starts off with Grant and Fisette shooting the breeze about still being friends after they fight and all that noise, then switches to Roxanne coping with her loss by bawling her eyes out in the fetal position, then switches to Raquel Pennington discussing what it was like coming out to her parents. Non sequiturs FTW!!

Anyway, Grant is our first featured fighter this week. He speaks in what I like to call “Terry Etim English,” in that I can only understand one out of every thirteen words he says. I think he’s missing his children, but he could just as easily be talking about buying his mum a caravan.

At the TUF house, a few members of Team Tate, including “friends with benefits” aficionado Julianna Pena (Author’s note: I’m a really good listener if you ever need one, Julianna. Just sayin’), start to play truth or dare. I shit you not. The first “truth” that comes up: Who’s the hottest guy in the house? Sarah “Cheesecake” Moras votes for Anthony “Sharkbait” Gutierrez. Pena strongly disagrees, labelling him the ugliest guy of them all. Choose your words wisely, Julianna, because if Gutierrez catches wind of his ugliness he will buwn this whole house to da gwound.

Josh Hill is up next and chooses dare. He is given the challenge of using a cheesy pickup line on Roxanne Modafferi. He chooses “Nice shoes, wanna fuck?” It should be noted that Roxanne is not wearing shoes at the time. She didn’t say “No,” though.

There seems to be a lot of chatter about Ronda Rousey’s mental state lately. The UFC women’s bantamweight champion has always gotten attention for her intensity and arm-snapping viciousness, but ever since Rousey the TUF 18 Coach began appearing on television a few weeks ago, the notion that the undefeated fighter is mentally unstable has started to pick up steam.

Not your normal, boo-hoo type of crying, either. Hers is an angry, motivated and terrifying type of cry. Former Strikeforce champion and would-be Rousey rival Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino called Rousey “mentally sick” after watching her on The Ultimate Fighter. Recently, Hallman did an interview where he recounted a story of an incident he said happened on the TUF set where Rousey told a producer of the show to shut their mouth while she was speaking to her, and then said that he believed that Ronda had mental health issues.

If Ronda Rousey is crazy, it’s the type of crazy that has become familiar to us in great competitors. Rousey isn’t an out-of-control head case, she’s a competitor. She’s not crazy, she’s a champion. And like many champions before her, Ronda is a fiercer competitor than most professional athletes. Her hyper-competitiveness, her apparent need to establish dominance in almost every and any situation, and her ability to used even perceived slights as fuel are traits Rousey shares with the likes of Michael Jordan and Anderson Silva.

Ronda Rousey is psyched about the matchup, though. “They’re such predictable little pussies,” she says. “[Modafferi's] not gonna be able to bully in, you’ll be able to pick her apart, it’s perfect.” Rakoczy apparently suffered a shoulder injury during her elimination fight, but she’s ready, and Miesha Tate will pay for every smile she smirked.

Modafferi thanks Tate for the fight-selection — in Japanese, obviously — and says she’s not going to underestimate Rakoczy, even though her team (and guest coach Dennis Hallman) are convinced that Modafferi’s got this one in the bag. Vengeful MMA Gods, that’s your cue to enter.

Edmond Tarverdyan mean-mugs Hallman and tries to pick a fight as soon as he sees him. Hallman calls his bluff and offers to settle it right then in the training center. Rousey holds her coach back, then gets in Hallman’s face and throws a “piss fit.” (Miesha’s words, not mine.) Dana White has to come in and play peacemaker, which is kind of an unexpected role for him. I’m sure it’s just that infamous reality show editing, but man, Tarverdyan and Rousey are really coming off like crazy assholes here.